In 2016, Donald Trump got a lower share of the white vote than the previous Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, and white turnout was stagnant as compared to 2012. Trump was able to win nonetheless because he got a higher share of Black and Hispanic voters than his predecessor — up roughly 3 percentage points with African Americans and 2 percentage points with Hispanics — helping tilt pivotal races in states such as Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania toward Trump.
That is, it was minorities, not whites, who proved most decisive for Trump’s victory.
Going into Election Day in 2020, Trump seems poised to do even better with minority voters. His gains in the polling have been highly consistent and broad-based among Blacks and Hispanics — with male voters and female voters, the young and the old, educated and uneducated. Overall, Trump is polling about 10 percentage points higher with African Americans than he did in 2016, and 14 percentage points higher with Hispanics.
Perceptions of Trump as racist and sexist seem to be a core driving force pushing whites toward the Democrats. Why would the opposite pattern be holding among minority voters — i.e. the very people the president is purportedly being racist against?
It may be that many minority voters simply do not view some of his controversial comments and policies as racist. Too often, scholars try to test whether something is racist by looking exclusively at whether the rhetoric or proposals they disagree with resonate with whites. They frequently don’t even bother to test whether they might appeal to minorities, as well.
Yet when they do, the results tend to be surprising. For instance, one recent study presented white, Black and Hispanic voters with messages the researchers considered to be racial “dog whistles,” or coded language that signals commitment to white supremacy. It turned out that the messages resonated just as strongly with Blacks as they did with whites. Hispanics responded even more warmly to the rhetoric about crime and immigration than other racial groups.
That is, on balance, these “racist” messages seemed to resonate more strongly with minorities than whites! Across racial groups, most did not find the messages to be racist or offensive — despite researchers viewing these examples as clear-cut cases of racial dog whistles.
As I pointed out back in 2016, another key factor for understanding minority support for Trump may be that minorities often hold antipathy toward other minority groups. As a consequence, even if we understand many of Trump’s policies and rhetoric to indeed be racist, minorities could support Trump precisely because his rhetoric or policies seem to target other minorities, whom they also dislike.
Many in academia and the media have a hard time with this. Newsrooms are disproportionately white and liberal spaces — much like institutions of higher learning. However, white liberals tend to hold peculiar views on racial issues — be it as compared to other whites or to people of color.
For instance, they often seem to think in intersectional terms: campaigns to assist Muslims, poor people, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, LGBTQ Americans, women, etc. are viewed as fundamentally interconnected — part of the same overarching struggle for justice and equality. Within this worldview, it would be natural to assume that if Trump says something negative about one minority group, it will likely alienate other minorities as well. Indeed, academics generally avoid examining anti-minority sentiment among members of minority groups — focused nearly exclusively on bigotry among whites.
However, as a matter of fact, people from historically marginalized or disadvantaged groups often hold very negative opinions of people from other minority populations — and do not seem to approach social issues in intersectional terms.
For instance, anti-Semitism, meanwhile, is significantly more prevalent among Blacks and Hispanics than among whites.
Moreover, many Black and Hispanic Christians are highly distrustful of Muslims. Many American Hindus feel the same way. Interestingly, despite the anti-Islam rhetoric of the president and many of his supporters over the last four years, more than one-third of Muslims seem likely to vote for Trump this cycle — a dramatic increase as compared to 2016.
Overall, Black Americans are more supportive of limiting immigration than any other bloc of the Democratic coalition. Meanwhile, anti-Black sentiment is common within many Arab, Hispanic and Asian communities in the United States.
This mutual antipathy is not just a matter of attitudes. According to FBI statistics, roughly a third of all hate crimes seem to be committed by racial and ethnic minorities.
Even within minority groups there are tensions.
For instance, although Hispanics are generally supportive of legal immigration, many insist that people come over “the right way,” and worry that illegal immigration has a detrimental effect on Hispanics already living in the United States. More than two-thirds of Hispanics view improving border security as a priority with respect to U.S. immigration policy. Indeed, Hispanics actually tend to be more concerned about illegal immigration than whites or Blacks.
Similarly, although Black people recognize the deep problems with policing in America, and do support a range of reforms — Black people are also quite supportive of cops and concerned about crime. For instance, according to a recent Gallup poll, 81% of African Americans want the number of police in their communities to stay the same or be increased.
In other words, far from alienating minority constituencies, Trump’s messaging on immigration, law and order and cultural conservativism may be an important source of his appeal to many voters of color — even as it leads many whites to distance themselves from him.
Of course, even for those voters of color who do recognize Trump’s rhetoric as racist — and are displeased with his racism — this doesn’t actually preclude them voting for him. Liberals often make it the focus of their politics to carry out symbolic actions, demonstrating that they are good people, who think, feel and say the ‘right’ way about race. But at the end of the day, what voters typically care most about is not which candidate is nicest, or who is the most pure in their hearts and minds — they are concerned with choosing the person who will make their lives better. And it is a glaring indictment of the Democratic Party that in the midst of a global pandemic and economic crisis that disproportionately affects women and people of color, that a growing share of these voters seem likely to cast their ballots for Donald Trump rather than Biden and Harris.
Indeed, it may be an error to look at Trump to explain the shifts among voters of color, as they could just as much be a product of minorities’ dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party.
In fact, Democratic attrition of minority voters predates Trump. The Big Tent party has seen losses with Hispanic and Black voters for virtually every midterm and presidential election since 2008. The 2016, 2018 and 2020 elections may therefore simply be continuations of trends from the preceding decade — a product of building alienation among minority voters from the Democratic Party — rather than reactions to the particular views or policies of the current commander in chief.
Fortunately for Democrats, Trump has turned off so many non-Hispanic white voters over the last four years that the party can probably avoid a racial reckoning — for now.
However, should alienated whites begin to migrate back to the Republican Party post-Trump, Democrats could find themselves in a tough electoral position if they cannot halt the long-running erosion of minority voter support. Disaffected voters of color turned the electoral tide in 2016. They could do so again in future races. One important lesson of the Trump era, then, is that neither political party should write off minority voters or take them for granted.
Published 11/2/2020 by NBC Think
Post-election update
The trends described in this article about voters of color, and its companion article looking at white voters, seem to have been borne out well in the 2020 election.
Writing for The Guardian, I triangulate Edison exit polls, precinct voting and demographic data, AP VoteCast, the American Election Eve survey, and other data sources. The article looks at trends not just for Hispanics / Latinos or Asians overall, but breaks down trends by ethnic sub-groups. All these data tell the same story: Trump seems to have done worse with whites as compared to 2020. Meanwhile, Democrats’ decade-long attrition with voters of color continued through the 2020 election.
The essay also shows how the prevailing narratives on gender and Trump have been just as bad as those on race — and were equally negated by the 2020 results.